Humanitarian services seek to promote welfare to save lives, maintain human dignity, alleviate suffering, strengthen preparedness, and provide material and logistical assistance in response to humanitarian crises. They are thus different from development aids that address underlying socioeconomic factors and provides support for the social, economic and political developments of developing nations. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are becoming the backbone technologies for providing quality and efficient services and are playing an increasingly important and sophisticated role in humanitarian-service activities. Many ICT-based solutions exist such as tools to support the work of humanitarian organizations, mobile applications and solutions to provide health services, open source web portals for disaster management systems, and mobile and autonomous devices to provide assistance. This edited book covers new developments, innovations, and research outcomes for the creation and deployment of effective ICT technologies and solutions to support humanitarian services. Coverage includes theories as well as information, mobile and networking applications that foster information exchange and cooperation in the humanitarian and emergency management fields. Aimed at ICT and computer engineers, professionals, and researchers working on practical and lasting ICT solutions to support humanitarian services, this will also be a useful reference for advanced students and lecturers in the field, entrepreneurs and researchers from government, non-government and industry organizations, as well as professionals in NGO organizations, ethics committees, and policymakers.
Inspec keywords: distributed databases; social aspects of automation; emergency management; Internet of Things; cryptography; educational technology; Big Data; disasters
Other keywords: big data; women; humanized education; information and communication technologies; vulnerable populations; humanitarian assistance; ICTs; blockchain; disaster mitigation; humanitarian services; resource-constrained populations; aged population; disaster recovery; IoT; inclusive education; disaster relief; humanitarian engineering; disabled population
Subjects: Distributed databases; Economic, social and political aspects of computing; Mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive computing; Emergency management; Data handling techniques; General and management topics; Educational administration; Computer communications; General electrical engineering topics; Computer networks and techniques; Computer-aided instruction; Cryptography; Education and training
As the world continuously faces humanitarian disasters, there is an ever-increasing need to find ICT-based solutions to overcome complex problems. In other words, though ICTs have changed the lives of people at the operative level, many ICTs' contributions are yet to be uncovered in humanitarian service. Therefore, this book provides new developments, innovations, and research outcomes; case studies and lessons learnt; and other considerations for the creation and deployment of effective ICTs to provide humanitarian services for the resource-constrained and vulnerable populations in the world in order to improve their lives.
Digital engagement (through mobile or other platforms) can significantly impact women and girls in humanitarian settings through freedom of expression and communication, better financial inclusion, more informed decision -making, and improved self-esteem. Yet, the existing gender gap in low- and middle -income countries is worsened in humanitarian settings where gender inequalities are heightened. Owing to systems of patriarchy that have practical consequences on women and girls' mobile or other technological solutions' access and use, women are falling behind. To correct this disparity, programmers must understand the state of access in their setting, real and perceived safety risks to women and girls' engagement, and choose meaningful woman- and girl -centered design. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to call attention to the digital disparity between men and women in terms of digital engagement in humanitarian settings and offer recommendations to narrow the gender gap through meaningful woman- and girl centered design of technological solutions.
The objective of this chapter is to analyse the profound technologies in our contemporary society, the process of humanization and inclusion as well as life forms based on coexistence, solidarity and the distributed participation of those who teach and learn through technologies.
The history of human creative and innovative pursuits is, at times, highlighted with instances of some most intellectually accomplished minds' biggest regrets about their own intuitive wisdom and scientific discoveries, ultimately proving to be unwarranted during some future course of modern observations and scientific developments. The most notable of all is Albert Einstein's self-admitted, suppressing his own intuitive conviction, the so-called `greatest blunder ever made in life' in 1917 about his failure to accept the validation of his own equations of the `cosmological constant' (usually denoted by the Greek capital letter Lambda: L) in his original field equations of general relativity, which ultimately turned out to be in fact quite consistent with current observations in view of the fundamental role that this cosmological constant now appears to be playing in the modern cosmology and closely associated to the concepts of dark energy and quintessence. This instance reinforces the very deep-rooted, fundamental and pioneering role played by intuitive consciousness as a guiding instinct or force in majority of pure creative enterprises and pursuits that the humans have been engaged with since the time immemorial. In this context, the present chapter aims at presenting a dossier of concepts and applications of information, communication and consciousness science going beyond conventional human and materialistic endeavours of the present-day society. It entails and invokes a systemic holistic perspective towards resolving many issues and challenges that the global society is currently upfront with. Systems perspective of cognitive consciousness holds that cognition can be explained by means of a continuous dynamic system in which all the elements are interrelated.
The adverse effects of human behavior with the natural environment activated the phenomenon of climate change like never before. Increasing number of disasters, both natural and man-made, around the world triggered an increasing amount of research in this field. Most of the disasters today have revealed that no one country is fully equipped with relief resources that can be deployed for every magnitude of disasters and that's when the countries are coming together to help the affected. With increasing nature, intensity and number of disasters, it is pertinent for emergency relief organizations to be ready and the recent advancements in technology space come in handy. However, it is observed that the critical 72 h immediately after the trigger event, technology is the least used in managing the impact of disasters.
The chapter is organized essentially on four parts. In the first and second sections, extensive evidence is gathered from the literature and from authors' own data collections showing that the major events elicit fast responses on the SM, but with varying slopes and laws of increase in the number of messages per unit time. The gathered evidence indicates that the data collected during the early stages post disasters can be used to infer the numerical and geographical extent of the disaster and of its consequences. In the third section, after reviewing the models proposed in the literature for the SNs activity fl ows, a thorough discussion of the models is presented and a set of models is selected for a specified set of disasters. The next part of the chapter (Sections 4 and 5) shows how to improve information extraction and predictions on the disaster effects, based on the responses on the SM and making use of the response models. This final part of the chapter proposes further improvements to the relief planning based on the derived information and predictions, in conjunction with models of resilience tailored to the type of disaster and to the local conditions.
The aims of this chapter are twofold. First, it describes the primary building blocks of blockchain technology. Second, it illustrates various use case scenarios of blockchain technology in the fields of agriculture, energy health and others.
Considering the importance of the potentiality of leveraging big data for enhancing resilience for disaster management, this study focused on the recent technology explored by various scholars on big data -based disaster resilience which can help people in all stages of disaster management. This study reveals that disaster resilience is a combined function of the adaptive, absorptive and transformative capacity of an individual or society to withstand and cope with the adverse effects of the disaster. This study explores the potential of big data in various stages of disaster management which can ensure the resilience capacity of a social unit. This chapter also highlights the major principles of big data for effective use for disaster management like open source tools, strong infrastructure, developing local skills, context -specific data sources, data sharing with ethics, awareness about the right of data and learning from experience. It also argues that big data is a potential tool for policymakers, administrators and related stakeholders to take necessary actions during and after disasters like early warning system, weather forecasting, emergency evacuation, immediate responses, relief distribution, training need assessment and increasing trained individuals. For getting maximum benefit from big data approach for disaster resilience, this study suggests to solve the related problems such as challenges in data collection, analytics, infrastructure, gaps between human and technological capacity, ethical and political anomaly, poor coordination, privacy and accuracy. This study recommends implementing proper infrastructure, technologies, tools and expertise for ensuring proper utilization of big data for disaster resilience. This study also focuses on further research on big data approaches for enhancing disaster resilience in context -specific cases by collecting primary data which can help to extend the use of it over the world.
Albay has zero casualty goals on every disaster that comes its way. Along with this, it is important that elementary schools, especially those schools that served as evacuation centers, receive and act upon the timely delivery of a warning system and make their school buildings as safe as possible. The main objective of the study was to design and develop the rapid damage assessment system for public elementary school buildings of Albay, Philippines. Specifically, it achieved the following: (1) identify the current procedures in conducting rapid damage assessment in public elementary school buildings of Albay; (2) determine the design features of the proposed rapid damage assessment system; and (3) generate appropriate report formats to represent the rapid damage assessment information. Rational Unified Process methodology phases and disciplines were used to design and develop the proposed system. Data were gathered through key informant interview and document analysis that covers Albay Province with four school divisions and 602 public elementary schools. The study is an efficient rapid damage assessment tool capable of processing and extracting information from the database and locates the public elementary school buildings of Albay through geographical information system support. It gathers information on school building damages, saves and views the data in real time, generates a report from the data collected, and provides quick and accurate information to the Department of Education officials to enable them to determine the type and extent of damages to the school building. Findings show that this new technique of assessing school damages is fast and efficient. The main advantage is the quickness and automation of the procedure. An evaluation study was also conducted to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed damage assessment system and found that the system was effective, reliable, useful, and efficient to the end users.
The PPDR communications are used by first responders in humanitarian crisis zones constituting a vital service for saving lives. The international telecommunication regulation organisations are fostering the use of broadband services to expand the usability of PPDR communications in emergencies, and promoting more efficient and agile spectrum usage in interference-prone scenarios like those potentially appearing in the borders of neighbouring countries. The BB-PPRDR radios require highly performing and flexible waveform technologies to accommodate the local spectrum landscape and coexist with adjacent or in-band secondary or co-primary transmissions. Therefore, both maximising the spectral efficiency demanded by the broadband services and meeting the spectral emission requirements to avoid interference to the coexisting signals are needed. To meet the spectral efficiency requirements, multi -carrier modulations that generate highPAPR waveforms are employed. Such waveforms put stringent requirements on the RF transceivers and the PA, which cannot be efficiently operated as significant back -off needs to be taken to meet the linearity requirements. Highly energy efficient radios are also a must in emergency rollouts where the access to the energy supply can be constrained.
Information technology plays a vital role in the development of every aspect of our lives. Internet, one of these many technologies, is the most utilised entity for accessing the ocean of information. However, many remote regions of the world are still deprived of this information available today. The prime reasons behind this deprivation are inadequate infrastructure facilities and remoteness of the concerned places. Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) support communication in an unorthodox way for the intermittent networks, where direct links always may not be available. A network architecture by combining DTNs, content delivery network using TCP/ IP, and OpenFlow with the help of wireless connectivity enabled devices can be one of the solutions to mitigate this problem. The network scheme aims to be implemented in Third -World countries where sometimes technological amenities are scarce.
This work presents a framework that takes a holistic approach toward fostering active aging of elderly people in the future of smart homes and empowering them to perform ADLs in an independent manner. Two specific functionalities presented are (1) a personalized task recommendation system that takes into account the various micro- and macro -actions that a user performs in the context of any given activity and recommends them actions and tasks to complete the same and (2) a fall prediction model that can analyze several dynamics of human motion and predict whether the person is going to fall, even before the fall occurs. These functionalities of the framework have been tested on several datasets and the results are presented and discussed. Comparison studies were also performed for each of these two functionalities where several learning models were implemented. Based on the performance characteristics of these learning models, a learning model that achieves the highest performance accuracy for each of the respective functionalities of this framework was adopted for our study. To the best knowledge of the authors, no similar approach has been done in this field yet. The results presented uphold the relevance and demonstrate the feasibility for practical implementation of this framework in the future of smart homes. This framework is envisioned to lead toward the development of the future of adaptive behavior intervention technologies in health care and social welfare that will be able to analyze, assess, model, profile and provide efficient personalized behavior interventions to enhance user experiences and foster elderly care while addressing the varying diversities of the elderly population. Future work would involve setting up an IoT-based environment through a host of both wireless and wearable sensors to implement this framework in a real-time context.
This chapter discusses the design, development, and evaluation of an arcade mobile game (BrickBlaster) for blind gamers in Bangladesh. The usual approach to develop video games for blind people is sensory substitution. Thus, the game was designed to have five levels and was developed using sound cues, vibro-tactile, haptic feedbacks, and voice-over instructions. We conducted an evaluation study with 24 blind people. The findings of evaluation study showed that the game was usable and playable by the blind people. The findings of the evaluation study suggest that completion of each level had reasonable difficulty with respect to completion time and number of attempts. As expected, the difficulty increased as the gamers moved to the next level. Moreover, no significant differences were observed by analyzing the impact of demographics (i.e., gender and high school vs. college) of the players on the playability of the game in terms of success rate, the number of attempts, level completion time, and player attitude measures. Furthermore, we found that the game received high evaluation score in terms of its ease of use, ease of learning, enjoyment, level of engagement, and level of excitement. Finally, we found that the participants' willingness to play the game in future as well as to recommend it to others was also high.
The humanitarian sector is overwhelmed with the constant need to be responsive to situational crises that have arisen in different parts of the world as a result of natural and, sometimes, man-made disasters. The results of which typically include violence, loss of life and a means of livelihood. One of such man-made humanitarian crisis situations is that happened in the north-eastern region of Nigeria. Challenges faced in the region include internal displacement, human casualties and food shortages. Information and communication technologies have played a role in ensuring that productivity is unencumbered by physical restraints. The challenges and opportunities of adopting the necessary technological innovations are explored in this paper with the aim of providing a framework that might be applicable to similar situations
Globally, the rate and frequency at which both natural and man-made disasters have been occurring are on the increase. The southern African region has its own fair share of disasters such as floods, droughts, wars and health issues, hence a need to establish structures for emergency preparedness. With the adoption of information communication technologies (ICTs), humanitarian services, for interventions during emergencies such as disaster preparedness, responses and awareness would be enhanced. This chapter discusses the nature of humanitarian issues affecting the region and how best adoption and adaption of ICTs have and/or can close the gaps of these issues, thereby maximising the efficiency of the humanitarian sector in mitigation, management and recovery efforts. The actor-actant-network theory was used as a theoretical framework for the study. The framework managed to outline how actors, their institutions and actants (technology) interact through their networks in disaster mitigation. The study revealed the ICTs that are used in the southern African region to mitigate, manage and recover from floods, droughts, health and conflict humanitarian disasters. The chapter further explored the challenges faced by the southern African regional countries such as funding, infrastructure, emerging technologies and computer literacy, among others that are affecting the adoption and adaption of ICTs in the humanitarian sector. Recommendations for adopting and adapting ICTs for the region by the policy makers are also discussed.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are everywhere and transforming the way we live. The availability of ICTs is also essentially transforming the humanitarian services by better addressing the needs of those affected by humanitarian crises. Therefore, this book strived to focus on areas that include connectivity and communications technologies for humanitarian services; ICTs in disaster mitigation, relief and recovery; humanized and inclusive education; technologies for the women, disabled and aged populations; IoT, big data and blockchain for humanitarian engineering; and the adoption of ICTs in humanitarian sectors.
